After the initial design and development of your OpenEdge application and the configuration of your OpenEdge database and Progress Application Server for OpenEdge instances, it is time to tune further. This phase requires you to iterate the following steps shown in the tuning cycle:

Figure 1. Optimization is a repetitive cycle

How can you tell if your application needs performance tuning? The leading indicators are that your users are experiencing unnecessarily long wait times or that your application is not responsive. These problems can be caused by increased load with some degree of decreasing performance. Modifying a system to handle a higher load is performance tuning.

For systematic tuning, follow these steps:

  1. Monitor your performance: Assess the problem and establish numeric values that categorize acceptable behavior.
  2. Analyze the performance based on the monitored measurements before you attempt to tune the system. In other words, have an accurate baseline of comparison to see if each change made improves the performance.
  3. Isolate the improvement you want to test to a single change.
  4. Change only one part of the system at a time to test whether the performance improvements.
  5. Test the change and compare the performance against the performance data gathered in the analyze step to confirm that the system performance has improved. If the change makes the performance better, then adopt it. If the change makes the performance worse, then restore the original.
OpenEdge provides several tools to assist you in the critical phase of monitoring. The remainder of this topic describes tools and processes for use in fine-tuning your OpenEdge application. The key to success is appropriate monitoring and benchmarks are run to isolate, change, and test one option at a time. The content is grouped by ABL, OpenEdge database servers, and Progress Application Server for OpenEdge.